What is “a Biblical Worldview”?

WBWV’s narrow Christian Fundamentalist orientation

My favorite negative voting guide, WeBelieveWeVote.org (WBWV), purports to rate political candidates “based on how well a candidate aligns with a Biblical worldview & Biblical principles.” The inherent supposition is that everyone who self-identifies as Christian (and perhaps even non-religious people who respect some idea of Christian values) all subscribe to the same “Biblical worldview” and ought to vote accordingly.

The trouble is that Christianity does not now and never has consisted of a single unified “worldview.” Specific doctrinal differences among nominal Christians, many of which distinctions we would now consider arcane, have been the basis for Christians killing other Christians for two millennia. 

For those behind WeBelieveWeVote.org the primary criterion for a “Biblical worldview,” as explained on the WBWV website, is this:

The Holy Bible is the supernatural, full, and inspired Word of God; it is inerrant, supreme, and final.
– II Timothy 3:16-17

Never mind, of course, that the cited Bible verse from 2nd Timothy was written before there was any general agreement as to what writings would later constitute the Bible. In addition, that passage from 2nd Timothy fails to specify which of the at least twenty-five different English versions of the Bible should be considered definitively inerrant. The Fundamentalist believer is asked to suspend all disbelief to the notion that whatever they are told by their pastor (or come to conclude on their own) is the literal Biblical truth to which they have been guided by God.

It should be no wonder then that some of these same people can be led to believe all manner of fantastical ideas, including, for example, that Donald Trump is actually part of God’s plan to bring about their salvation or that Democrats control the weather.

The conviction that “the Bible” (version-unspecified) is the inerrant word of God is the central tenet of Christian Fundamentalism. Wikipedia defines Christian Fundamentalism as:

…a religious movement emphasizing biblical literalism.[1] In its modern form, it began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among British and American Protestants[2] as a reaction to theological liberalism and cultural modernismFundamentalists argued that 19th-century modernist theologians had misunderstood or rejected certain doctrines, especially biblical inerrancy, which they considered the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

Most Protestant denominations have among their parishioners those who adhere to a strain of Christian Fundamentalism that stretches back to the tent revivals of the 1800s. Certainly there were Fundamentalists among the congregation of Methodists in which I was raised, people who taught Bible stories in Sunday School as the not-to-be-contested literal truth. 

Even as a ten year old I recognized there were people among these folk who insisted that some sort of fossilized version of Noah’s Ark had been found on the side of Mt. Ararat in modern-day Turkey; people who insisted that humans had cavorted with dinosaurs and that the dinosaurs had only perished in The Flood—concepts that ran ever more contrary to the physical evidence of geology, biology, and archeology that I read in books from an early age and, later, saw in the laboratory and in the field.

WBWV’s central tenet of Biblical inerrancy leads directly to the seven day creation story of the Book of Genesis as the literal truth. It follows, based on the seven day creation and the “begats” of Genesis, that the entire universe must be only a few thousand years old. In the Fundamentalist belief system it also follows that much of modern science taught in public schools is a threat to one’s faith. 

It should be no surprise, then, that another of the WBWV Fundamentalist criteria of alignment for candidates is a commitment to the Republican talking point of “school choice,” the idea that public funds should support private schools and homeschooling where the Fundamentalist worldview can be taught—rather than “woke” public schooling that teaches modern science. Of course, WBWV couches that 19th century Christian Fundamentalist for religious schooling more subtly:

It is the fundamental right and responsibility of parents to direct the education of their children.
– Prov 22:6Eph 6:1-4 [those underlined references link to the Biblical passages WBWV rather bizarrely uses to justify the statement]

The Christian Fundamentalism of WBWV’s “Biblical worldview” is further on display in their “Position” on “The Environment” [the bold is mine]:

God’s creation should be properly protected and stewarded. The environment is provided for our use to produce food and provide resources for an abundant life. We have a duty to protect the environment for its beauty, provisions, and sustainability.
– Genesis 2:15Ezekiel 34:18 [links]

Note the orientation. The environment exists solely for the benefit of humanity. Humans are central. All of creation revolves around human needs “to produce food and provide resources.” It follows that God put coal, oil, and gas in the ground as a resource for the benefit of us humans, no geological processes or associated modification of the atmosphere or climate need be contemplated. Humans have no agency in the atmosphere or the climate. As one Fundamentalist Facebook commenter put it, “God is in charge of the climate,” i.e. we humans can and should ignore climate warnings and just “drill, baby, drill.”

The Christianity in which I was brought up in the Methodist church understood that the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, represented the world as seen through the prism of one culture, that of the ancient Hebrews; that the creation story in Genesis was to be interpreted allegorically rather than as literal truth; and that God granted humans the intelligence to understand the world through observation and experiment and to act in the world toward our fellow humans according to the precepts taught by Jesus of Nazareth. All of my upbringing stands in contrast to the Christian Fundamentalism of WBWV’s largely Old Testament-based “Biblical worldview & Biblical principles.”

Visit the “Core Values and Positions” webpage of WBWV and see for yourself what they are selling as a Biblical worldview. I pose WBWV’s worldview as a rejection of reason and of science, a rejection that threatens the continuation of the human species on this planet. 

Study the “alignment ratings” in the WBWV voter guide and vote like your life—and those of your children and grandchildren—depended on it. 

Take note that in each and every contest the candidate more highly “rated” by WBWV is the “Prefers Republican” candidate on your ballot, although WBWV avoids saying so. This should come as no surprise. The Republican Party has been systematically courting the doctrinaire Christian Fundamentalist vote for decades while hinting (and sometimes declaring) that harboring anything less than what is a Fundamentalist belief system is God-less and perverse—essentially “other”. 

Brought up in the New Testament Christianity of the Methodist church of the 1960s I recognize far more in the way of Christian values among Democrats than among modern-day Republicans—and certainly more respect for reason, rationality, and science.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Somewhere in my early teens one of my teachers put up a geologic timeline. It ran around the upper part of all four walls of the classroom. The time during which we modern humans have existed on planet earth scaled to a minuscule sliver at the end of the timeline. For me it was a vivid and memorable illustration of what I’d been absorbing for years already.

Imagine being a WBWV Christian Fundamentalist parent faced with a child who had been introduced to such a timeline in what they might characterize negatively as a “woke” classroom. Horrors. How would you shield your child from these ideas that contradict the received “truth” that the earth was created in seven literal days around six thousand years ago? Seen in this light public education is an agent of brainwashing one’s children and a mortal threat to one’s faith. It is no accident that WBWV “alignment” verges on a call for “school choice,” a euphemism for public funding for religious schools or religion-based home schooling.